Original source
Employment Exposure: Employment and Wage Effects in Urban Malawi (2020)
Journal article · Economic Development and Cultural Change · 68(2), 471–506
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© 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Used in these cards
Ability-Heterogeneous Wage Returns
"Individuals at the 25th percentile were 25 percentage points more likely to be employed if they were induced to receive job experience through the experiment; they also earn approximately $11.01 more per day."
Actual vs. Potential Experience Bias
"Potential experience is considered a poor proxy in general, and the prevalence of interrupted or delayed schooling and periods of unemployment in the developing-country context renders this an even poorer proxy for actual experience in these areas."
Broad-Based Wage Distribution CDF Shift
Distributional Wage CDF Shift
"These wage impacts do not appear to be concentrated among a few individuals; rather, we see a distributional shift among those acquiring the short-term work experience opportunity."
Capital Injection Superiority Over Skills Training
"They find little support that skills training has been effective and instead push for policy makers to place more emphasis on programs that include capital injections, as the evidence base increasingly suggests that such policies are more effective"
Causal Wage Returns to Short-Term Work Experience
"The work experience opportunity provided in the experiment increases average wages by slightly less than $4 per day during the postintervention period."
Contract Permanence vs. Daily Wage Trade-Off
"The negative coefficient suggests that individuals induced to receive work experience through the experiment work in less permanent positions."
Educated Youth Underemployment Trap
"Data from a nationally representative household survey shows that urban men who have completed secondary school work only 23.4 hours per week, conditional on being employed."
Firm-Specific Training Non-Transferability
"Skills related to this particular questionnaire are highly firm- and project-specific and are unlikely to be valuable in the general labor market."
Formal Resume Experience Reporting Discrepancy
"Roughly 15% of the sample had no previous work experience based on the self-reported measure of the baseline survey. This number rises to 35% when measured using work experience reported on the participants' résumés."
Informal Network Substitution for Formal Reference Letters
Reference Letter Invalidation by Networks
"Column 5 of table 9 shows that those who received work experience as a result of the experimental treatment were actually 7.9 percentage points less likely to use a reference letter when applying to a job."
Intensive Margin Daily Labor Supply Adjustment
"In this labor market, individuals are more likely to adjust their labor supply at the daily rather than the hourly margin; they are also paid per day rather than per hour."
International Employer Experience Premium
International Experience Network Multiplier
Prior Research Experience Return Magnification
"Yet, the wage returns are magnified for those with either international employer or existing research experience."
Intersectoral Occupational Reallocation
"However, the pattern of results suggests that work experience increases employment in both administrative and managerial roles, as well as in clerical and related work, whereas it reduces employment in agriculture and related occupations."
Job Security Stress-Reduction Response
Stress Reduction via Probabilistic Fallback Jobs
"Godlonton (2020) shows that a possible pathway for this behavior is a stress response: individuals with more secure outside options were able to perform better due to reduced stress related to job uncertainty."
Low-Ability Foot-in-the-Door Effect
"Individuals of lower ability (as assessed by a numeracy and literacy test) benefit the most from the work experience."
Cross-Sectoral Wage Spillovers Outside Specialty Roles
"Although the point estimates are positive for both RA positions and non-RA positions, the large wage returns seem to be driven by employment in non-RA positions."
Non-RA Sectoral Wage Spillover
"The employment results mirror the earlier findings: we estimate (noisy) positive point estimates of the impact of the experience on employment in RA positions... and non-RA positions. We observe a very interesting pattern for wages... the large wage returns seem to be driven by employment in non-RA positions."
Non-Response Bounding and Weighting Robustness
"To address concerns related to the nontrivial level of attrition, we conduct two bounding exercises... In both cases, we find broadly consistent results."
Pay Frequency Contract Permanence Proxy
"We infer that lower-frequency reporting levels correspond to longer duration contracts and construct a frequency of payment variable equal to 1 if the individual reports daily remuneration, 2 if weekly, 3 if fortnightly, and 4 if monthly remuneration."
Potential Experience Measurement Bias
"Potential experience is considered a poor proxy in general, and the prevalence of interrupted or delayed schooling and periods of unemployment in the developing-country context renders this an even poorer proxy for actual experience in these areas"
Probabilistic Job Offer Instrument
"The probabilistic outside options strongly predict the probability with which participants received any job (earned or lottery job)."
Referral Quality Incentive Gap in Job Networks
"In addition, when offered performance incentives for referral, men recommend higher-quality candidates, suggesting that under normal operating considerations, they do not necessarily recommend the highest-quality candidates they know."
Reservation Wage Inelasticity to Experience
Reservation Wage Rigidity Post-Employment Exposure
"These results suggest that an increase in reservation wages is not likely an important pathway."
Resume-Survey Experience Measurement Discrepancy
"Roughly 15% of the sample had no previous work experience based on the self-reported measure... This number rises to 35% when measured using work experience reported on the participants' résumés."
Social Job Network Expansion
"In sum, the broadened social (job) network acquired through this process seems to be a contributing factor in the large realized wage returns."
Social Network Expansion Mechanism
"Individuals who received work experience as a result of the experiment are 22.2 percentage points more likely to have heard about a work opportunity through someone they met during the intervention."